Frustration is optional. Progress is inevitable.
Here’s what I do to (almost) never feel frustrated with my guitar practice… no matter how hard I have to work, and no matter how slow my progress.
Listen to this podcast whenever you need to switch your mindset and attitude to the “ready to grow, eager to learn, happy to be challenged” channel.
Key Takeaways:
- If you are developing skill, you are voluntarily signing up for the experience of being limited. This isn’t something that you can avoid. Nor need you wish to avoid it
- “If it weren’t a struggle, I wouldn’t be interested in the pursuit itself. I would be on to something else already”
- When you stop being curious, you stop learning, and you stop exploring… you start dying
- If you’re in a state of frustration, what success will mean to you and the feeling of satisfaction that can come from, it tends to be something that’s even further out of reach than what success might normally mean. When you have an open and curious attitude
- Learn to magnify your interest and your focus on the details of what’s happening (cause) instead of what’s happened (effect). Pay more attention to what are you doing to cause a certain effect (or to cause a lack of effect), rather than focusing on the outcome of what you’re trying to play
- This distinction is fairly subtle, but it’s an attitude that you can adopt that will almost inevitably caused you to make more progress. You’ll also enjoy the process a whole lot more
- You continually participate in this process of finding out what your limits are. And in finding out what your limits are, you see if you can overcome those limits. And then in overcoming those limits, you end up exposing more limits
- As long as you remain open and curious, then you are essentially signing up for not only being limited, but having the experience of being limited and having to confront your limitations over and over again
- Whatever outcomes occur as a consequence of this effort are just a bonus. The point is the process itself
- Frustration only ensues when you forget that the whole point of the whole process is dedicated to this act of exposing your limitations, trying to figure out why those limits exist, and attempting to overcome them. Frustration only ensues when you believe that things should be any different than exactly as they are
- Adopt this mindset to decrease the amount of time that you spend being frustrated while also recognizing that frustration is likely to occur, and also recognizing that frustration needn’t occur as often or for the same reasons that it might be occurring right now. Nor need the frustration last long
